Halley
Page 19
Even as a child I saw what a hard life women had. Most bore five to ten children, and those children were delivered by untrained midwives. My own mother married at fourteen and had me at fifteen with only her mother-in-law in attendance. The same grandmother also delivered the next two of my siblings. The third, a boy, weighed twelve pounds! Women had to scrub clothes by hand and press them with flatirons heated on a wood-burning stove. They canned goods from May through September and cooked three meals a day from scratch. Yet despite their hardships, women had little more than a child’s say in the family.
Tufting bedspreads was one way mountain women could earn actual cash, but their husbands usually took the money. To make up for the earnings her husband took, one of my aunts used to “steal” a chicken every now and then to trade at the store for things she wanted–to her husband, she pretended hawks took the missing poultry.
One-room schoolhouses were common—I attended one for a few months when I was ten. Schooling beyond three or four years was considered a senseless luxury. As my mother said when I refused to drop out of school at age sixteen, “They won’t pay you a bit more at the mill if you have a diploma in your hand.” She really fussed when I decided to go to college. In fact, all five of Mama’s children ended up finishing college, and she eventually saw the sense in it.
Franklin Roosevelt’s CCC camps provided training and education—not to mention nutritious food and good clothing—to many a mountain boy. My mother’s brother joined the CCC in 1936, and his stories of his adventures helped me with this book.
Theodora Langford is fictional, but she was inspired by several women photographers who took great risks to document events and people. Dorothea Lange, in particular, portrayed the face of Depression-era poverty in the photographs she made for the Farm Security Administration. I wanted Theodora to show Halley her Georgia mountain people and at the same time provide an example of what a woman could do.
Martha Berry, however, was a real person. Though she was born in 1865 to an affluent plantation family, she recognized even as a child the poverty and illiteracy all around her. As a young person she started her first school for the children of local farmers. In many cases, she had to convince parents that education was worth their children’s time away from farm labor. In 1902 she began a boarding school for boys and in 1909 opened one for girls. From the start she planned for these young people to work while they learned so they could pay for most of their own education. Not content with serving local youngsters, she often traveled into the mountains with her father to recruit promising students. She was recruiting wealthy donors, too. By the time she established Berry College in 1926, she had set her sights on people like Henry Ford, who shared her vision for educating the children in mountain Georgia. Eventually, Ford paid for the building of a new girls’ campus, using Gothic architecture and local stone.
Because Martha Berry died in 1942, I never knew her. But I was one of the Georgia mountain kids her schools educated. When I enrolled in 1957, many things had changed, but the school still had a work program that allowed students to earn most of their education costs and it still required uniforms. During the Great Depression, the best place—often the only place—for a kid like Halley to get an education would have been Berry College.
No, I didn’t need to do much research for this story. I just fictionalized my experiences and those of my family.
It’s easy to cast a rosy glow over such bygone days, but on close examination I’d have to agree with Dolly Parton’s song about her growing-up time: “A million dollars would not buy my memories of way back then, but for a million dollars I wouldn’t live it all again.”
— F. G.
About the Author
Faye Gibbons knows firsthand about the people who populate her books. Born into a large mountain farm family, she grew up in mill towns and mountain communities throughout northern Georgia. After college, she married an Alabama boy and moved away, but part of her heart remains in the mountains of her childhood. Over the years she has shared stories from that childhood with her students and with two sons. Now those tales go into her books. When she isn’t writing, she fills her time with gardening, basket weaving, quilting, and weaving. Gibbons now lives with her husband on an Alabama farm where Gibbons and Johnson ancestors have lived and worked since the 1800s.
To learn more about Faye Gibbons and Halley, visit www.newsouthbooks.com/halley